York Review Research Articles

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Sexualities of Imagined Bodies During a Time of Social Isolation

As the world shifted into social isolation at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, many found remote dating to be their only outlet for romantic and sexual interaction. In this paper, I examine the constructed reality of personal advertisements in the COVID‐19 era. I focus on the meaning individuals find in online dating and how they use their imagination in the development of online relationships. I followed the stories of those individuals who took out personal advertisements in the New York Review of Books at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Although I draw on textual analysis of these advertisements, I am less concerned with the genre and more concerned with the ad authors' relationships to online dating. By conducting interviews, I found that online relationships offer their own distinct pleasures and that their format affords individuals more freedom of self‐presentation and expression than in‐person dating, thereby setting participants up for potentially more successful romantic first impressions.

Academic Law Libraries and Scholarship: Communication, Publishing, and Ranking

The context in which academic libraries operate is fast evolving, and the current COVID pandemic has underscored the new demands on libraries to reinvent themselves and their scholarship role. The library’s role has always been focused on scholarly dissemination and preservation, more recently by archiving their faculty work on mirror sites known as academic repositories. Libraries connect scholarship and users by offering the space for users to come and use the archived knowledge. However, if historically their role was to collect and provide secure access to sources, that role is in the midst of radical transformations. In our age of the Internet, the connection between knowledge and library users has become more complex. First, users have formed attachments to print or digital knowledge according to the type of reading they engage in, moving fluidly from one to the other. In that respect, as James M. Donovan has recently explained, the library space remains an intrinsic facilitator of a type of academic reading. Second, when knowledge is accessed digitally, the flow of content becomes decentralized. Instead of expecting their needs to be found in the library, users seek out resources wherever they may be stored, anywhere on the planet. More interestingly, technology enables users to develop a different connection to the digital content, creating it while accessing it, from the mere “likes” or “dislikes” to virtual annotations through reader comments, for instance. Either way, libraries are seeing their passive intermediary role dissipate: even when shelving knowledge, as this article advocates, libraries may choose to become engaged in new ways as active participants in the scholarship enterprise. After reviewing the background against which these challenges have appeared, we suggest that libraries define for themselves a more active role within scholarship production, which we define to include publication, distribution, access, and the process of scholarship impact assessment. The argument rests on the practical considerations of business organization. It is simply good business for law schools to curate the output of faculty scholarship, and many already do it through faculty repositories. Given that foundation, it seems logical for the library, as the institution which already manages those repositories, and which supports the students’ law reviews and journals in numerous ways, to step up and manage the full range of scholarship publication. This library management of student-edited scholarship production could cover all its aspects, excluding editorial publication decision and manuscript editing, from training and assisting to gather sources for cite checks, adding journal content to institutional platforms, administering technology services, and advising on copyright. Another reason for supporting a more active role for libraries in the scholarly enterprise rests on the flaws of the current academic ranking of scholarship. Without human input, no automated system—including the newly-promoted Hein database—can meaningfully contextualize the value of a citation. For instance, only librarians can find the equivalent (if any) of scholarship cited and reviewed in the NEW YORKER or the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS among scholarship cited in another law journal or review article, or calibrate the value of an article citation in a court decision. To the extent there is agreement that quantifying scholarship citation impact requires human expertise, then we argue for librarian expertise.

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

Picture by Lillian Ross

Reviewed by: Picture by Lillian Ross Kevin J. Hayes (bio) Picture, by Lillian Ross. New York: New York Review Books, 2019. xvii + 214 pp. Paper, $16.95. Ebook, $16.95. Reading Lillian Ross’s Picture for the second time, I find myself approaching the book somewhat differently than I had a decade ago when I first read it while researching A Journey through American Literature. Then I was trying to situate Ross’s story of the making of The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s film adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel, within literary history. I saw Picture as a seminal contribution to the New Journalism, anticipating such works as Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The New Journalists sought to elevate nonfiction to the level of the novel, using novelistic techniques, original narrative approaches, recurring motifs, and extensive dialogue. Having previously made the case for Picture as literature, I now find myself rereading the book to see how it holds up. The most detailed production history then written, Picture unquestionably deserves attention as a film studies classic, as its publishing history verifies. Ross initially published Picture as a series of articles in the New Yorker. MGM released The Red Badge of Courage in 1951, and Picture appeared in book form the following year. It has been frequently reprinted. Limelight Editions, a publisher of important works of cinema history, reissued Picture in 1984. Garland reissued it the following year as a Cinema Classic, and, in 2004, an Italian translation appeared in the series Minimum Fax Cinema, which includes several fine books documenting the history of motion pictures. Other publishers have made taller claims for Ross’s book, seeing Picture as an important literary work in itself. In 1998 Picture appeared in the Modern Library, the longstanding series of [End Page 232] great books. The New York Review Books edition similarly situates Picture within the history of world literature. Other editions have appeared with supplementary material. In 2002 Da Capo published the fiftieth anniversary edition with an introduction by Ross, which the New York Review Books edition reprints. Recalling the genesis of Picture, Ross conveys her awareness that she was taking a new literary approach. When she first pitched the project to the editor of the New Yorker, she characterized it as “a kind of novel-like book because of the way the characters may develop and the variety of relationships that exist among them.” She told the editor, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form” (xv). The Anchor Books edition is the one that introduced me to Picture. This edition appeared in 1993 with an original foreword by John Huston’s daughter and a distinguished filmmaker in her own right, Anjelica Huston. The New York Review Books edition reprints her foreword, as well. She recalls reading Picture aloud with her husband: “We were laughing and having a lot of fun when suddenly I realized that reading this book was like being in the same room with my father” (ix). Prompted by Anjelica Huston, I initially approached Picture as John Huston’s story. Rereading it in search of additional elements that give Picture the necessary depth and complexity great literature requires, I now notice other characters. My initial impulse to read Picture as John Huston’s story is understandable. Besides being a great director, he was a larger-than-life character, the only person in Picture who can be so described. Seen as a literary character, however, Huston is a disappointment. Though Ross had stressed character development as she foresaw the completed work, Huston never really develops. He is pretty much the same at the end of Picture as he is at the beginning. Gottfried Reinhardt, the producer of The Red Badge of Courage, is much more interesting in terms of character development. So is Huston’s assistant, Albert Band, who starts as a yes-man and gopher, reaches a low point when Reinhardt forces him to puppy-sit his wife’s French poodle, but gradually comes into his own. Huston’s producer...

Unethical reading and the limits of empathy

192 aria tumarkin, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and emigrated to Australia as a teenager, everywhere exhibits in her work the hard-­ won knowledge that authentic civic-mindedness often produces, and requires—an estrangement from consensus and the deadening language of common sense. Tumarkin’s fourth book, Axiomatic (2019), challenges reflexive frameworks of grief and trauma, offering instead the specificity of individual lives in their entanglement with the lives of others. Such vigilance is a quality Tumarkin shares with the Zambian novelist, critic, essayist, and scholar Namwali Serpell. Author of the critical study Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014); of the novel The Old Drift (2019), a multigeneric, multigenerational conversation Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin Unethical reading and the limits of empathy M exploration of Zambia’s history and future; and, most recently, of Stranger Faces (2020), a series of linked essays, Serpell displays throughout her work a rigorous attention to affect, aesthetics, and ethics, and how they are enmeshed with our individual and collective histories. In 2019, Serpell published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “The Banality of Empathy,” in which she questioned our assumption that art promotes empathy—or that it should. The problem, she argued, is not simply that empathy substitutes for action, but that it promotes its own kind of moral callousness, a fascination with others’ pain. Assuming a basic fungibility between self and other, empathy of this kind is particularly dangerous when it comes to race: “Black pain, black death, is the clarifying limit case for the use of art for empathy. Its very seamlessness condemns it.” Over an exchange of emails, she and Maria Tumarkin revisit her argument about the banality of empathy in the context of the present, while also discussing their respective interests in narrative, the ethics of time, and the fraught nature of writing and reading. —the editors maria tumarkin I must say that by talking about the banality of empathy in your 2019 essay of the same title, you articulated very precisely something (a disquiet, a protest, a sick feeling) that had been in my head for over a decade. I wonder, with the world being what it is, whether you see any “non-­ banal models” of ethics that could describe some (potential) ethical work that literature can do or has done. Or perhaps there is something intrinsically banalizing and self-­ serving about “ethicalizing” conversations about reading and writing (e.g., “giving voice to the voiceless”—yet another pungent banality…)? namwali serpell Iris Murdoch has a remarkable anecdote in her book The Sovereignty of Good. She’s arguing against the models TUMARKIN | 193 194 | SERPELL of ethics so prominent in philosophy courses: theories of moral action and utilitarianism. And, because she’s a writer, she tells a story about a woman, a mother (M), who is struggling with her relationship to her daughter-­ in-­ law (D): “M finds D quite a good-­ hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him.” Now, M doesn’t ever reveal this view of D: she “behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way.” But, as I’ve written elsewhere, even if her behavior doesn’t alter in the least, if M “‘observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters,’ then any internal change ought to seem moral to us.” Which is to say, our general understanding of morality is as much about thinking, reflecting, and changing internally as it is about external actions. This means that perfectly quotidian, internal experiences of consciousness— like reading and writing—can be a mode of ethics. Now, Murdoch never says exactly how M’s perspective on D changes; she doesn’t even suggest that empathy is the ground of her deliberate reflection. Murdoch leaves all of this to our imagination , which is a beautiful trick, in that it demonstrates precisely what telling...

Stiletto, and: Volterra

Stiletto, and: Volterra Sylvie Baumgartel (bio) Stiletto What happens to good girls?They get presents.What happens to bad girls?They get tied up & locked in the closet. A stiletto was first a pen,Then a dagger,Now a heel.Caravaggio's Medusa was painted on a shield.The painting itself is an object of warfare.I wear purple marks from you on myEyes & hips. Medusa's head is full of tinFrom pots & pans & knivesThrown into the molten bronze becauseCellini was feverish & threw in hisKitchen to finish his sculpture. I'm the girl projected;I'm the girl unprotected.My head too is full of the kitchen.My head too is full of knives. [End Page 37] Volterra A day of Prosecco & maps.You inhaled the musk from my hair.You drove my childhood curves;I dressed in the part. I rode shotgun inYour dead father's Porsche.The car he never lived to drive.The car he never could afford. Tupac took us up to the hill town,Bach Fugues brought us down.They say the first witch ever,Daughter of the huntress Diana &The Devil himself, was born& cast her spells here. The churchTortured her & stretched herOut on a stretching frame. You said you liked Rosso Fiorentino'sDeposition because it's so simple.But the green & smiling godCollapsing in the painting you need,Is actually the most complicatedThing in the world.The body is being removed fromThat which defined it. [End Page 38] Sylvie Baumgartel Sylvie Baumgartel is the author of Song of Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), her debut book of poems. Her second book of poetry, Pink, will be released in February 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan, Harvard Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review (2015). She lives in Santa Fe, N.Mex. Copyright © 2020 Emerson College

Czy jesteśmy odpowiedzialni za wspólny świat? Wojna w Syrii i dylematy współczesnego Zachodu

This text concerns main moral issues connected with the armed conflict currently underway in Syria. On the basis of an analysis of texts published in the opinion-forming American journal The New York Review of Books, the author tries to show the complexity of the conflict in terms of the problems faced by world opinion.The author concludes that we, ordinary citizens, and the leaders of the world powers, in undertaking actions (participation in military actions, taking sides, humanitarian aid) had to resolve certain dilemmas and that in doing so they took into account their subjective interests. The author thus confirms his original thesis that the contemporary world is no longer guided by international solidarity or the UN principle of a “responsibility to protect.”

Out of Time: Time-Travel Tropes Write (through) Climate Change

Out of Time: Time-Travel Tropes Write (through) Climate Change

From the Editor

Richard Kopley and Paul Lewis, cochairs of the PSA’s Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, are busy with the plans for the 2021 conference to be held in Boston at the historic Omni Parker House Hotel founded in 1854. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Marilynne Robinson. Her essay on Poe in the February 5, 2015, issue of the New York Review of Books begins with this sentence: “Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day.” She also had this to say on the bicentennial of Poe’s birth: “I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain” (Baltimore Sun, January 19, 2009). Phillip Philips, chair of the conference program committee, will be the one receiving submissions for papers and panels; see the CFP on the back cover of this issue.In early February, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Spain will hold its Second International Conference, “Beyond Childhood and Adolescence: Growing with Edgar Allan Poe.” The conference will be at the University of Almeria, located in southern Spain; the CFP appeared in the last issue. The keynote speakers will be Gerald Kennedy and David Roas Deus. For more information, see http://www2.ual.es/eapsa2020/index.php/almeria/.I want to take this opportunity to give special thanks to the editorial board members for their time and expertise in responding to the many essays we get; triple-blind review requires much work on their part, and we have been receiving many submissions recently—which, of course, we welcome!At the PSA Executive Board meeting at the ALA in May, it was decided to add a book review editor for the journal. We want to thank John Martin, scholarly communication librarian at the University of North Texas, for taking on this role beginning with the Spring 2020 issue. He has established a new set of guidelines for book reviews, and these will appear in the next issue of the journal as well as on the PSA listserv.

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

Adela Pineda Franco's Steinbeck and Mexico: A Cinematographic Gaze in the Era of United States Hegemony

From the Editor

Richard Kopley and Paul Lewis, cochairs of the PSA’s Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, are busy with the plans for the 2021 conference to be held in Boston at the historic Omni Parker House Hotel founded in 1854. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Marilynne Robinson. Her essay on Poe in the February 5, 2015, issue of the New York Review of Books begins with this sentence: “Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day.” She also had this to say on the bicentennial of Poe’s birth: “I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain” (Baltimore Sun, January 19, 2009). Phillip Philips, chair of the conference program committee, will be the one receiving submissions for papers and panels; see the CFP on the back cover of this issue.In early February, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Spain will hold its Second International Conference, “Beyond Childhood and Adolescence: Growing with Edgar Allan Poe.” The conference will be at the University of Almeria, located in southern Spain; the CFP appeared in the last issue. The keynote speakers will be Gerald Kennedy and David Roas Deus. For more information, see http://www2.ual.es/eapsa2020/index.php/almeria/.I want to take this opportunity to give special thanks to the editorial board members for their time and expertise in responding to the many essays we get; triple-blind review requires much work on their part, and we have been receiving many submissions recently—which, of course, we welcome!At the PSA Executive Board meeting at the ALA in May, it was decided to add a book review editor for the journal. We want to thank John Martin, scholarly communication librarian at the University of North Texas, for taking on this role beginning with the Spring 2020 issue. He has established a new set of guidelines for book reviews, and these will appear in the next issue of the journal as well as on the PSA listserv.

Look Back in Compassion

Look Back in Compassion Arie M. Dubnov (bio) More than law in a general, abstract sense, it is the fraught, almost hostile relationship between state laws on the one hand and international law and international human-rights organizations on the other that occupies a distinctive place in contemporary debates concerning Israel's character. Is Israel offering us a one-off case? I doubt it. The tendency of nationalist leaders to oppose vehemently any international arrangement that might curtail national sovereignty is as old as the history of the modern nation-state and is certainly not unique to the trembling Jewish and/or democratic republic. Quite on the contrary: despite its contemporary image as an inward-looking pariah state that dismissively ignores what others (i.e., the goyim) have to say about it, Israel today seems to fit quite elegantly into a broader, global pattern marked by the rise of right-wing populist politics and the general decline of liberal and social-democratic values. Next to unprecedentedly high levels of existential insecurity and xenophobia, the clear symptoms of this global influenza include a heated cultural backlash or "nausea" rhetoric—an audacious, reprehensible attack on so-called progressive virtues captured in slogans about political correctness, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism—coupled with an equally disgraceful attempt to undermine democratic values that seems to have been taken for granted by the so-called old elites. As one of the New York Review of Books' bigwigs declared recently, "We are in the full gale of a conservative counterrevolution that could last for some time and reshape modernity in a reactionary direction."1 Contemporary Israel follows this pattern. It would be a crude simplification, of course, to argue that there are no fundamental differences that set Viktor Orbán's Hungary apart from the rising antialien sentiments that brought the Brexiters to power in Britain or between both of these and Israel's hypernationalist hawks. But it would be equally silly to hold on to the rose-tinted neoliberal vision that was offered to us by [End Page 179] Francis Fukuyama and his acolytes, who predicted the "end of history" after the fall of East European communism. Unlike liberal democracy, so far history shows no signs of ending anytime soon. And yet, each unhappy state is unhappy in its own way. Structurally, part of what does make the Israeli situation different is the fact that Israel lacks a constitution. Thus, to navigate through murky waters, Israel's Supreme Court judges must rely on a limited list of Basic Laws—the local equivalent of a law with constitutional authority—or on a creative interpretation of some of the clauses in the yellowed seventy-year-old scroll on which the Israeli Declaration of Independence was written and signed, despite the fact that the document is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document in the proper sense. Moreover, the basic task of settling "the unfinished constitutional business of defining Israel's legal character," as Simon Rabinovitch put it recently, is not left to lawyers but to politicians.2 Indeed, adding a new Basic Law to the list is arguably one of the highest achievements any coalition government can aspire to. Thus, passing the Basic Law that defined Jerusalem as Israel's capital in July 1980 can perhaps be seen as one of Menachem Begin's biggest political achievements—even though, and maybe precisely because, it avoided using words such as annexation and sovereignty and did not specify Jerusalem's exact municipal borders—while passing the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty (March 1992) is remembered as one of the last remaining legacies of Yitzhak Rabin's government (although technically the legislation process started earlier, under Yitzhak Shamir's prime-ministership). Historically, part of what makes the struggle between human rights and national sovereignty especially interesting in our case is the fact that Jews, and often Jews who have conceived of their identity in ethnonationalist terms and who have openly defined themselves as Zionists, have been found in both camps. I am writing these lines in summer 2018, shortly after the Knesset adopted a nationality law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, mentions no...

The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim by Christian Bärmann, and: Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale by Pyotr Yeshov

Reviewed by: The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim by Christian Bärmann, and: Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale by Pyotr Yeshov Jan Susina (bio) The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim. By Christian Bärmann. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Detroit: Tiny Mole and Honeybear-Wayne State University Press, 2019. Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump: A Russian Folk Tale. By Pyotr Yeshov. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. The Children's Literature Association's annual Anne Devereaux Jordan Award is given to an individual who has made significant contributions in scholarship and/or service to the field of children's literature. At the 2019 ChLA Conference, the award went to Riitta Oittinen, partly in recognition for her extensive work as a translator of English-language children's texts into Finnish. In choosing Oittinen, the first translator and translation scholar to receive this award, ChLA was both recognizing her individual contributions and reaffirming the importance of translation as a vital, although sometimes overlooked and even controversial, form of children's literature scholarship. Another important area that is sometimes given short shrift in terms of scholarship is the historical recovery and bringing back into print of significant older children's texts, accompanied by scholarly scaffolding. Thanks to Google Books and various digital archives, access to once difficult to obtain children's titles is increasingly available to scholars. But books, especially children's books, are more than literary works; they are also aesthetic objects of print culture. Important series such as the New York Review Children's Collection and Princeton University's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales are reissuing compelling older children's books in print editions. When I teach my version of the history of children's literature course, I am grateful to publishers such as Dover and Broadview Press for offering historical children's books in affordable paperback editions. My own research on nineteenth-century literary fairy tales has greatly benefitted from reprinted anthologies such as Jonathan Cott's Beyond the Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairy & Fantasy, Michael Patrick Hearn's The Victorian Fairy Tale Book, Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher's Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, Mark West's Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America, and Jack Zipes's Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. For those who do not have convenient access to special collections dedicated to children's books, facsimile editions, such as those reprinted in The Bodley Head's Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books or Garland's Classics of Children's Literature, are invaluable. Zipes has contributed to this area of historical recovery of children's texts with two newly translated literary fairy tales, one from Germany and the other from Russia. Pyotr Yershov's Fearless Ivan and His Faithful Horse Double-Hump is the better known of the two tales. First published in 1834, it quickly became a popular story for children and adults and was eventually recognized as a classic of Russian children's [End Page 456] literature. Inspired by the verse folktales of Alexander Pushkin, Yershov published The Little Humpbacked Horse, which features Foolish Ivan, a well-known figure of Russian folklore. Foolish Ivan is the Russian equivalent of Jack in the English Jack tales. In Zipes's translation, Ivan Petrovich is the foolish but kind-hearted third son who succeeds in various seemingly impossible tasks and eventually marries the Heavenly Princess, thanks to the guidance of his faithful little horse. Zipes acknowledges that he has taken "a good deal of poetic license" (Yershov 87) in translating and transforming Yershov's poem into a prose fairy tale, while retaining its oral style. Kornei Chukovksy, the famous writer of Russian nonsense poetry and stories for children, praised Yershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse as "a work of genius" in his study of children's language, Two to Five (1933), and singled out Yershov's skillful capturing of the colloquial speech of common people (Yershov 81). The tale became so popular that it quickly appeared in multiple chapbook editions and re-entered the Russian oral...

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 4 6 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z We are used to seeing 1968 through the eyes of students in their early to mid-twenties. They protest government abuses, authoritarianism , racism, and the war in Vietnam; marching through Paris and Prague, these students announce a new political sensibility . They were born in the midst of World War II or in its immediate aftermath. But they are too young to remember its horrors and have grown impatient with the order of values it left in its wake. Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries keeps a foot on either side of this generation. His epic sixteen-hundred-plus-page novel moves from summer 1967 to summer 1968 through the eyes of a thirty-fouryear -old single mother and her ten-year-old daughter. The twoperson family lives in New York City, having migrated there from Germany six years previously. The daughter, Marie Cresspahl, was born in Düsseldorf in West Germany; the mother, Gesine Cresspahl , comes from Jerichow, a small town on the other side of the A n n i v e r s a r i e s : F r o m a Ye a r i n t h e L i f e o f G e s i n e C r e s s p a h l , by Uwe Johnson, translated by Damion Searls (New York Review Books, 1,720 pp., $39.95 2-volume boxed set, paper) 1 4 7 R Iron Curtain. Her family had split between Nazis and anti-Nazis. Now they are all dead, and Gesine tells Marie about them. What would the sixties seem like to someone with actual memories of the recent war – or to someone too young to rebel against her parents? Johnson’s answers to these questions are weighed and poignant. Skirting easy critiques of the decade’s better-known figures, he does suggest that their historical advantage over their elders – freedom from World War II complicity – is partly a blind spot. The young protesters his slightly older protagonist observes cannot always see how di≈cult it will be not to repeat the mistakes of 1930s Europe, or how often these mistakes are already being repeated and built on in 1960s New York. They also don’t yet face the challenge of becoming authority figures themselves: of needing to raise a new generation in the wake of ruins, tragedies, and failures. Johnson died in 1984 at the age of forty-nine, having just completed the last volume of Anniversaries. He had put it out in four installments, in 1970, 1971, 1973 and, after a long pause, 1983. Much of the novel echoes his own life, which began in Anklam, a small town in Mecklenburg, Germany. Born in 1934, Johnson saw his father become a Nazi o≈cial. The father was captured by the Soviet army at the end of the war and was never seen again; his family eventually presumed him dead. In 1945, Mecklenburg became part of East Germany. Tightening barriers began to separate it from Western Europe. Johnson’s mother fled to West Germany in 1956, leaving her son behind, which resulted in local repressions against him. Three years later, he sneaked through into West Berlin as well, and lived the rest of his life moving between West Germany, New York, and England. A member of the famed Gruppe 47 (which also included Günter Grass), he published several acclaimed novels before Anniversaries. But this final, monumental novel was posthumously recognized as his magnum opus. Gesine Cresspahl and several of her family members had already appeared in Johnson’s debut novel, Speculations About Jakob (1959). Johnson claims that he had a vision of Gesine in New York almost a decade later while living there with his wife and young daughter. The vision overtook him, he claims with characteristic detail, on Tuesday, 18 April 1967, at 5:30 p.m., on Forty-Second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. He and the apparition 1 4 8 F I G L E...

Introduction: A Special Issue on Editing Ulysses

Introduction:A Special Issue on Editing Ulysses Charles Rossman James Joyce's Ulysses was plagued from the outset by hundreds of printing errors. The 1922 first edition, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach through her bookstore "Shakespeare and Company," contained an insert apologizing "for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances." During the course of eleven printings and two editions between 1922 and 1930, Shakespeare and Company attempted to correct their errors without achieving a reliable text. Subsequent editions by other publishers fared little better. Random House, for example, mistakenly set its first American edition in 1934 from an exceedingly corrupt (and cleverly disguised) pirated version. Although Random House tried to make things right by completely resetting the text of Ulysses for their 1961 reprinting, specialists agree that the 1961 edition is marred by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of errors. From 1922 to 1961, then, most efforts to establish a correct text of Ulysses appear to have added as many mistakes as they eliminated. In 1977, Hans Walter Gabler, a German scholar who had done post-doctoral work under Fredson Bowers at Virginia, undertook to establish an authoritative text of Ulysses. Financially supported by a $300,000 grant from the German government and encouraged by the trustees of the James Joyce estate, who welcomed a substantially changed text of Ulysses as an opportunity to extend the soon-to-expire copyright, Gabler and his assistants worked at re-editing Ulysses for seven years. Their new, computer-generated Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition was published by Garland Publishing on June 16 ("Bloomsday") 1984. The new Ulysses was not, however, merely a corrected reading text. It was a three-volume critical edition with a genetic display of the history of the text's composition on the left-hand pages, the established reading text on the right-hand pages, and some two hundred pages of textual apparatus. Moreover, in preparing his edition Gabler eschewed orthodox methods of "copytext editing," which probably would have yielded a corrected version of either the 1922 first edition or the 1961 Random House edition. [End Page 98] Instead of correcting an existing edition, Gabler undertook a complete, genetic reconstruction of Joyce's text from the existing manuscript materials. Beginning with the so-called Rosenbach manuscript, which is the fullest extant version of the early text in Joyce's own hand, Gabler traced the processes of Joyce's subsequent deletion, revision, and expansion. The result was a wholly new version of Ulysses that differed in some 5,000 details from the version that Joyce himself saw through the press in 1922, and in nearly as many for the 1961 Random House edition. Because of the magnitude and importance of the editing task, Gabler's bold editorial theories, and the novel (at the time) application of computer technology to the humanities, the Gabler Ulysses captured extraordinary attention even as work-in-progress. Upon publication, it achieved instant success in the popular press, with front-page coverage in the New York Times, a major review in Time magazine, and wide coverage in numerous lesser journals. Like the commentary in the popular press, most of the early academic reviews glowed with admiration for Gabler's achievement. The new Ulysses did not receive its first sustained and serious critical scrutiny until John Kidd presented a paper, "Errors of Execution in the 1984 Ulysses," at the Society for Textual Scholarship in New York City in April, 1985. There, Kidd ignited a controversy that has raged for five years. Gabler, Kidd, and a host of other commentators have battled in the pages of The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement; Kidd has published a 175-page monograph in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1989) attacking the new Ulysses; a hard-cover volume called Assessing the 1984 ULYSSES appeared in 1986; and two international conferences—one in Monaco in 1985, another in Miami in February 1989—have been devoted to its evaluation. Most recently, Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart, two distinguished scholars who are cited on the edition's title page as members of its Academic Advisory Committee (along with Richard Ellmann) have published Ulysses: A Review of Three Texts...

Always on the Other Side

This essay analyses paradigms of migration in We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo (b. 1981, Zimbabwe), a recent example of new African (or ‘Afropolitan’?) literature. A teenager idealises migration to the United States as a flight to emancipation, if compared to internal flows of forcedly removed people, or unsuccessful flows to South Africa, or even to Britain. As a counterpoint, a downfall follows the flight. The first American experience is a snowfall, then stumbling on the English Language is compared to a fall; physical as well as psychic downfalls send illegal migrants into the invisibility of undesirable jobs and into lying (Mehta 2016) but also into a mental condition. This final outcome of migration has been approached with the tools of ethno-psychiatry (Beneduce 2016-2018) and the recently published short story about migration by Maaza Mengiste, “This is What the Journey Does” (2018). DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-94 Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2007. Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness, New Formations, (Winter) 63: 121-137, https://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/files/igsf/Ahmed1/multiculturalism.pd (consulted on 5/06/2018). Becker, Rayda. 1999. Homesteads and Headrests. H. Judin & I. Vladislavic eds. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 79-83. Beneduce, Roberto. 2016. Traumatic past and the historical imagination: symptoms of loss, postcolonial suffering, and counter-memories among African migrants. Transcultural Psychiatry, 53, 3: 261-285. Beneduce, Roberto. 2015. The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum. Medical Anthropology. Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 34, 6: 551-571. Beneduce, Roberto, 2008. Breve dizionario di Etnopsichiatria. Roma: Carocci. Bwesigye, Brian. 2013. Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story? Reading Helon Habila’s Review of We Need New Names (22 November) http://asterixjournal.com/afropolitanism-africas-new-single-story-reading-helon-habilas-review-need-new-names-brian-bwesigye/ (consulted on 25/05/2018). Bosh Santana, Stephanie. 2013. Exorcising Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why ‘I am a Panafricanist, not an Afropolitan’ at ASAKU 2012 (8 February) https://africainwords.com /2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explainswhy-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/ (consulted on 25/05/2018). Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2013. We Need New Names. London: Chatto & Windus. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. Eat, Drink, & Be Literary (19 March). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjOGa5BH8Ok (consulted on 25/05/2018). Concilio, Carmen. 2018. Il frigorifero come antroposcenario. Un portale verso l’Occidente per i migranti. D. Fargione & C. Concilio eds. Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie. Bologna: Il Mulino, 227-242. Dabiri, Emma. 2014. Why I’m not an Afropolitan (21 January), https://africasacountry.com/2014/01/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/ (consulted on 25/05/ 2018). Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Animal that Therefore I am (trans. by David Wills). Critical Inquiry, 28, 2 (Winter): 369-418, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 (consulted on 25/05/2018). Habila, Helon. 2013. We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo - A Review. The Guardian, (20 Jun) https://www.theguardian.com /books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayoreview (consulted on 25/05/2018). Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 7: 237-251. Mbembe, Achille. 2007. Afropolitanism. Njami Simon ed. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 26-30. Mehta, Suketu. 2016. The Secret Life of Cities, https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/event/urbanization-lecture-series/ (consulted on 25/05/2018) [La vita segreta delle citta, it. trans. by Norman Gobetti. Torino: Einaudi]. Mengiste, Maaza 2018. This is what the Journey Does. The New York Review of Books (May 17), http://www.nybooks.com/daily/ 2018/05/17/this-is-what-the-journey-does/ (consulted on 7/06/2018). Mofolo, Thomas 1931. Chaka. An Historical Romance, trans. by F. H. Dutton and introduced by Sir H. Newbolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nguyen, Viet Tahanh ed. 2018. The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. New York: Abrams Press. Okwunodu Ogbechie, Sylvester. 2008. Afropolitanism: Africa without Africans, (April 4), http://aachronym.blogspot.it/ 2008/04/afropolitanism-more-africa-without.html (consulted on 25/05/2018). Selasi, Taiye. 2014. Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local, https://www.ted.com/talks_taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from _ask_where_i_m_a_local_t-3852 (consulted on 25/05/2018). Selasi, Taiye. 2015. By-By Babar, The Lip, (3 March 2015), http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 (consulted on 25/05/2018). Sieber, Roy. 1980. African Furniture and Household Objects. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schoene, Berthold. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2008 [1989]. Satanic Verses. New York: Random House. Tveit, Marta. 2013. The Afropolitan Must Go (28 November 2013), https://africasacountry.com/2013/11/the-afropolitan-must-go/ (consulted on 25/05/2018).

Getting the Story Joan Didion's Aesthetic Transformation

Many contemporary readings of Joan Didion, not to mention her public profile, present her early journalism as her crowning achievement. Works such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are venerated as definitive Didion texts. However, Didion's work, in particular her journalism and memoir, underwent a radical change following these texts. This change can be witnessed in the transformation of Didion's style and politics between Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her later work, which often appeared in the New York Review of Books under the editorial guidance of the late Robert B. Silvers. This article tracks this change, identifying Didion's move away from surety and an objective voice towards ambivalence, subjectivity and nuance in search of a specific ideal of truth. I argue that the development of Didion's style, both aesthetic and poetic, reflects a political evolution and a reconstitution of what it might mean to approach truth on a personal and journalistic level, and this has a particular resonance given present conversations around truth in journalism and politics.

Dworkin: A New Link in the Chain

This book brings together nineteen of the articles published by Professor Dworkin over the last eight years, mostly in the New York Review of Books, but also in learned journals and collections. Three articles, none of them of major importance, have not been published before: Can a Liberal State Support Art? (pp. 221-36),1 On Interpretation and Objectivity (pp. 167-80),2 and Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest (pp. 10418).3 Several pieces published during the last few years are not included, of which the most important is an article on equality.4 The book lacks thematic unity, but it will be welcome as not only does it bring together many of Dworkin's influential articles, but it makes available to a wider audience several articles not widely known before. Of these, two are of particular importance. Principle, Policy, Procedure (pp. 72-103) applies Dworkin's general theory of adjudication, with its emphasis on individual rights, to issues of evidence and procedure whose sensitivity to the public costs of the judicial process seems to undermine Dworkin's apparent view that in adjudication, rights should take precedence over issues of public policy, such as administrative expedience. The second, Do We Have a Right to Pornography? (pp. 335-72) is not